Ys: The Ark of Napishtim does everything it sets out to do flawlessly. Visually the game is very pretty. The art is very appealing. On a technical level, today's gamer raised on the PlayStation, might scoff at the 2D art. The game isn't pushing massive numbers of polygons around. There aren't any 128-bit bells or whistles being employed here. You won't find bump mapping or even outdated trilinear mipmap interpolation, or any other graphic buzzwords in use. Just clean, crisp, artistic 2D graphics of another era. You're not going to find an angst ridden story filled with metaphysical psychobabble. You're again just going to get a clean, crisp, well told story in the spirit of adventure, much like the serial adventures of the 1930s. You're not going to get whining teenagers bitching about their feelings. You're going to get surprisingly deep fully realized characters you'll actually root for and wish to save. You're not going to find a battle and magic system filled with combos and two-minute long spell casting animations. You're just going to get one combo from a single button per sword, and magic animations under a few seconds in length. You're not going to be bored. It's never going to seem tedious. It's going to be just simple fun. A pleasure to play. And in a strangely sad way, it will seem like a breath of fresh air. It's nearly perfect. The only thing wrong with it is it's short, like all games in the genre tend to be. About twenty hours. Which is a rather glaring flaw, in a game I didn't want to end. I'm giving it a 9.5. If you have even the slightest affinity with the action role playing genre, then you owe it to yourself to experience Ys: The Ark of Napishtim.
Next up should be the initial impressions on Star Wars: Republic Commando.
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